Users of mobile appliances, such as cell phones and pocket computers, have discovered great utility in being able to exchange text messages. In order to improve efficiency, it has become commonplace to abbreviate or to modify text so as to speed entry of the text. The practice has become so commonplace that it has become a comprehensive subset of language. One such codifying of text has recently been referred to as “teen-speak” or “lingo” and has a significant following, but it is not universally useful and it is not trivial to interchange with conventional text.
As an example of how text may be codified, in teen-speak the numeric value 2 is used as a phonetic substitute for the words “to” “two” and “too”. The numeric value 4 is used to substitute as “for” and the numeric value 8 may be seen for the letter trigram “ate” either as a word or as a syllable in longer words such as “mate” (m8), “gate” (g8), “innovate” (n of 8).
Professional users of text based services also use codification. In its simplest form, this may be simple abbreviation. As an example, aviation weather reports will usually alter, contract or abbreviate words in the interests of brevity of the text, relying on a trained reader to interpret the full meaning. In part there is an historical basis for this; because teletype systems were used to retrieve and show information, it was essential that the information code could in fact be represented entirely by the available machinery. A sample taken from Chicago O'Hare terminal area forecast, transmitted as FM0700 19013KT P6SM VCSH SCT035 OVC070 is translated to read “From 7 am coordinated universal time, the wind is expected to be from 190 degrees at 13 knots. The visibility is expected to exceed 6 statute miles with showers expected in the vicinity. There is a scattered cloud layer expected at 3,500 feet with an overcast layer expected at 7,000 feet.” There is considerable efficiency from such codification but it is exceptionally difficult for an untrained user to read. Of course it is understood that codification extends to obfuscation of meaning as well, but in the case of this invention we may be less concerned with deliberate secrecy resulting from engineered cryptography.
Staying with the weather text example, intensity of a weather phenomenon may be indicated by simple characters such as + or − but we have the problem of needing to understand the contextual relationships between the elements of a sequence. Turning again to the weather example, +RA would mean heavy rain but −TSRA would be interpreted to mean Thunderstorm with Light Rain. The user is assumed to understand that it is the precipitation that is light, not the overarching thunderstorm conditions.
Recently, codification of text has included objects, such as icons. Use of these icons has been facilitated by improvements in the appliances and in the networks. An example of such objects are commonly named “emoticons”. Emoticons typically use punctuation symbols in combination to give an emotional depth to electronic text exchanges. For example, by using three punctuation symbols a happy face may be made :-) or a sad face may be made :-(, either of which connote a much greater span of meaning than the text alone. The addition of a richer graphic environment allows these base symbologies to be replaced by more expressive icons such as  and .